A DEGREE OF THE SURREAL,

THE NOT-ENTIRELY-REAL,

AND THE MARKEDLY ANTI-REAL

About

1. The turbulent flow of air driven backward by the propeller or propellers of an aircraft. Also called race2.

2. The area of reduced pressure or forward suction produced by and immediately behind a fast-moving object as it moves through air or water.

intr.v.slip·streamed, slip·stream·ing, slip·streams

To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.

3. a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, in July 1989. He wrote:

"...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," at the heart of which is a cognitive dissonance..

Slipstream falls between speculative fiction and mainstream fiction. While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real.

Posts Tagged ‘Mozart’

I have come to think of December as the Dark Month

not just because of the difference between a Winter December and a Summer December, but because it is really incredibly dark. Day seems to last about fifteen minutes, and mostly that is overcast day. You get up in the dark and go for an afternoon coffee in the dark. But this is only an observation. Not a complaint..

because I have been in love with winter forever.

it is not that there is no light, but that light in this dark month is always subtle, diffuse, exquisitely elusive. The land, covered in snow, is often brighter than the sky. This is not a light that illuminates or demands. This is a hesitant, tentative light that allows infinite delicate reflection.

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i love when snow falls thickly enough to blanket the world, turning the forest black and white and grey; the way the city turns sepia coloured, and the way snow swallows sound. I am enchanted by that particular silence that comes when it snows, as if the world is holding its breath. It feels to me as if the world has turned into a metaphor. Everything feels significant.